Stevens Interview On 'Gresh and Zolak'

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/09/23/brad-stevens-on-gresh-zo-all-about-practice-in-exhibition-season/



Brad Stevens On Gresh & Zo: All About Practice In Exhibition Season
September 23, 2014 12:12 PM





Celtics head coach Brad Stevens (R) joins 98.5 The Sports Hub's Gresh & Zolak from the Celtics golf outing. (Photo by Mike Thomas)



BOSTON (CBS) — After a long offseason filled with numerous research projects, Celtics head coach Brad Stevens is ready for his second season in the NBA.

Stevens and his staff were hard at work this summer, trying to figure out everything that went wrong during Boston’s 25-win campaign, and more importantly, how they can improve for the upcoming season.

The C’s head coach joined 98.5 The Sports Hub’s Gresh & Zolak while at the team’s seventh annual “Teeing Up For Kids Golf Tournament” at the Dedham Country and Polo Club, and expects a lot of improvement when things get started next week at training camp.

“Going into June and into Summer League we had a pretty good idea of how we wanted to do things barring any major changes in the roster, and there weren’t major changes. Now it’s just a matter of us sitting here and waiting,” said Stevens.

Stevens went into detail how he expects his team to improve despite such little roster movement.

“Every team has a margin for error, and you have to play the details to the ‘Nth’ degree. If your margin is a little lower you have to be an elite detail team, and we weren’t. We had a low margin for error and were not an elite detail team, so we have to become more of that,” he said. “When you compare talent across team to team or game to game, if you control what you can control you have a great chance at winning. You saw that a lot, especially late in game, where we were there at times, but we just didn’t give ourselves enough of a chance by being as tight as we could be.
“That’s been a big focus for us. We spent a lot of time analyzing most games and our individual players, and analyzing the best players in the NBA to see why they’re the best. We’ve had a lot of research projects because we’ve had too much time,” he joked.

Stevens said he’s much more prepared for the rigors of the NBA schedule heading into his second season on the Boston bench. One big difference from last year will be the emphasis on practice during the team exhibition season.

“After spending 13 years of college I thought I knew the ins and outs of the schedule and how to fix things that weren’t going right and ride things that were going right. I knew how to make the next day better. You learn that here because of the uniqueness of the schedule,” he said. “Last year at this time we had just moved and my head was spinning from that, and we were ready to get into a schedule that I was told about but I don’t think I really grasped the lack of practice time.

“So one thing that was easy is we’re going to make October much less focused on the exhibition games and much more focused on practice. This is all about practice for one month because it’s really the only time we get to all year,” he said.




bob




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Atta boy, Brad.  Practice is what it's all about....especially if you expect the team to become more detail-oriented.  Practice is where you drill the stuff into them, and exhibition games are where the stuff is put into practice.

I'm a little surprised Brad wouldn't know in advance how many full practices they'd have.  Doc talked about it all the time.  Not counting walkthroughs and film sessions, they can count on about two dozen of what Doc called "good" practices during the regular season.

Sam